Environmentalist Ranchers

Struggle to Preserve Both the Land and a Way of Life

Cowboys and Environmentalists Call Off the Range War to Find Common Ground

Shortly after sunrise, I sip hot coffee and stand on the flank of an ancient lava flow, listening to the ranch wake up. Hunting hounds howl from their pens, mules paw the metal-pipe corrals with their hooves, a windmill groans, something whistles—a dove flying toward a sea of high-desert grassland stretching to slate-colored mountains biting into the lavender sky. Such big, brutal, fragile landscapes kindle in me a homesickness that I cannot allay, a yearning for my childhood home on a northern Arizona cattle ranch. But I have no home here. I have come to these Malpai Borderlands in southeastern Arizona as a tourist, a voyeur with a laptop tasked with learning about how this land could be lost forever and about the people who struggle to save it.

These grasslands have attracted visitors for 10,000 years. They came first to hunt game with spears and stones, camping at springs still seeping up from igneous cracks in the earth. The 16th-century Spanish explorers called the borderlands Mala Pais, “bad country.” The porous lava malpais rock, which is the color of cayenne and charcoal, made rough travel for the conquistadores.

Today, state lines and a national boundary bisect the Malpai Borderlands, which encompass about 800,000 acres that stretch northeast from the U.S.-Mexico border near the town of Douglas into southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. The land straddles other, more delicate borders. It sits at the convergence of several habitats-the Sierra Madre Mountains, the Rocky Mountains, the Chihuahuan Desert and the Sonoran Desert. The flora and fauna are diverse. Jaguars occasionally roam here. The rare and endangered pincushion cactus grows here. Fragile frogs and endangered rattlesnakes survive here. And yes, endangered Arizona cattle ranchers live here, too.

That includes ranchers like Wendy and Warner Glenn, who have already fed me fried eggs and toast because they breakfast always at 5 A.M. so they can begin their ranch work soon after. Since the Glenns were first married in 1960, they have lived on this Malpai Ranch. The Glenns are in their 60s now; Warner slender, tall, blue-eyed and unfailingly polite; Wendy short, solidly built, determined, more opinionated and outspoken. Their daughter, Kelly Glenn-Kimbro, participates in roping events for charity, and also happens to be the poster girl for Ruger Firearms Co. She adeptly shoots weapons bearing that name and helps her parents out with cowboying-rounding up cattle, branding, cooking and mending dirt roads shredded by monsoon downpours.

Repairing a road after a heavy rain is not an entirely unpleasant task. Rain is a blessing that nurtures the grasslands. “Please send us some rain and thank you for the rain,” Kelly’s daughter, 10-year-old Mackenzie, will often add to her head-bowed recital of grace before dinner. But even blessed rain won't guarantee a modern rancher's survival in the borderlands. Kelly and Warner team up as outfitters and guides for hunters, because, like most borderland ranchers, the Glenns need a second income so they can afford to stay on the land, to which they're as stubbornly rooted as the thorny mesquite.

Ever since the Texas cattle drives of the late 1800s, ranchers have fattened their herds on these great lakes of green and gold, rich with tobosa, gramas, bush muhley, Arizona cotton top and hog potato grasses. Like the Glenns, many of the Malpai Borderlands ranching families trace their stewardship back for generations to patriarch homesteaders. Each ranch has a heart of private land surrounded by leased federal and state land to make up cattle ranches that range in size from 15,000 to 45,000 acres.

For years, borderland ranchers felt threatened by government regulations, fearful that bureaucrats would run them off the land with the barbed wire of fine print. They felt equally threatened by environmentalists clamoring to evict cattle from public lands. Many distrusted The Nature Conservancy, which had been buying up private land in the borderlands to prevent development. And on top of those pressures, intermittent drought and long-term economic pressures have forced many pioneer ranching families in Arizona, including my own, to sell out.

But after years of fretting, the Glenns and their neighbors launched a counterintuitive quest for survival that began with kitchen-table discussions between ranchers and conservationists at the Glenn ranch. The assigned scribes for the group were Bill McDonald, a conservative local rancher, and the late Jim Corbett, a liberal Tucson Quaker who had helped refugees fleeing Central American wars.

Together, McDonald and Corbett wrote up the group's agenda in 1992. They recognized the conservationists' love of wilderness as "an Eden unspoiled by human sins," and the ranchers' love of "a specific wildland that is one's home." They sought common ground based on love of the land that would both preserve the landscape and its wild creatures and make profitable cattle ranching possible.

In 1994, they formed the nonprofit Malpai Borderlands Group, with headquarters at the Glenn Ranch. The loosely structured group now includes environmentalists, bureaucrats, conservationists, scientists and ranchers.

The group is now known around the world for innovative ecological ranching programs, including the concept of grassbanking-the cooperative shuttling of cattle from drought-stricken ranches to other member ranches that have sufficient range to graze the animals without harming the grassland. Members have reinvigorated their land with prescribed fires. Their erosion-control programs and efforts to protect the habitat of endangered species have been successful.

You cannot know a landscape until you let it swallow you up. Bill McDonald, whose ranch sits a few miles from the Glenn spread, has a gentle quarter horse for me to ride, a sure-footed gelding named Willie that easily navigates around boulders, yucca stalks, oak trees, mesquite thickets, juniper branches. As a kid, I rounded up cattle on horses like this in land as big as this, and it feels like I am home.

Like most ranchers, McDonald never tires of getting out into the country to check fences, cattle and grassland. McDonald is 6 feet 6 inches tall and shades his blue eyes with a Stetson hat. Today he wears the cowboy's uniform-long-sleeved work shirt, jeans, worn bat-wing chaps, boots. He grew up in towns and cities, but his grandfather's outfit in the borderlands always pulled at him. After graduating from Arizona State University, he returned to his ancestral homeland. A few years later he married Mary, who loves the country, too. McDonald has, out of necessity, returned to the city for grant money, and he was awarded a 1998 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant for his work advancing ecological ranching.

McDonald dismounts at Cowboy Flat, a table-flat grassland high up over Sycamore Canyon. Just a year before, he helped set this land on fire as part of a 46,000-acre "prescribed burn," intended to restore grasses debilitated by a century of fire suppression. The new grass shooting up from the ashes nourished both the cattle and the doe and her fawn we see in the distance.

Bill and Mary McDonald have only one child, Sarah, who does not yet know whether she wants to take over the ranch when her father gets too old to run it. But the McDonalds and several other borderland ranchers hope to preserve the land even if their heirs don't want to be cowboys. Many have sold "conservation easements" to the Malpai Borderlands Group, which holds the easements in trust. So far, the Malpai Group has used $4.2 million in donated funds to buy conservation easements for 75,000 acres of private land on 13 ranches.

A golden eagle sits on a railroad tie near the Krentz outfit in the San Bernardino Valley in the Malpai Borderlands. Brothers Phil and Rob Krentz ranch their spread, which reaches into the oak and juniper speckled slopes of the Chiricahua Mountains to the north.

The brothers are not twins, but they look the part-stout with blue eyes and matching walrus mustaches. Their family has ranched this land for three generations, but a long drought drove them to the edge. Their only chance lay in selling a conservation easement to the Malpai Group in 2004. Having protected the land, they are at peace.

Don Kimble, a former college professor and champion rodeo roper, owns a ranch nearby. One day I watch the middle-aged, mustachioed Kimble brand yearlings in his shipping corral. Like so many cowboys, he'd been severely injured. His galloping horse stumbled in a coyote hole and fell on top of him. Kimble now uses an orthopedic stirrup, determined not to let his injury interfere with the life he loves. He has no children and wanted to keep the land free from subdivision after his death, so he sold a conservation easement to the development rights to the Malpai Group. He will die knowing he honored his father and grandfather by protecting this big country.

The endangered Chiricahua leopard frog survives in a water tank at the Magoffin ranch, close by Bill McDonald's outfit. Anna and Matt Magoffin and their sons, Chris and Mike, for years have struggled to keep the frogs alive, even hauling water to the tank during the drought. With the help of the Malpai Group, the Magoffins worked out deals with federal and state agencies that allow them to water their cattle and care for the endangered frogs.

One day, Anna and I sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee. She is alone, which is not unusual; Matt is off working his second job and the boys are away at college, so many of the ranch chores have fallen on her strong shoulders. She accepts the responsibilities happily, knowing that the family can now afford to stay on the ranch. Selling conservation easements to the Malpai Group helped the Magoffins save their ranch.

Sitting at Anna's table, I am reminded of a hike I'd taken the day before with Peter Warren, a Nature Conservancy grasslands expert and an active member of the Malpai Group. The Nature Conservancy has mentored the borderland cowboys and helped them create conservation easements. Warren, a city dweller, loves the Malpai Borderlands as much as any cowboy and believes that a forward-thinking rancher is one of the best ways to protect it.

Warren and I, two urban refugees, had hiked in a valley beneath limestone cliffs on the Krentz ranch. We both knew, without saying so, that the rugged, stubborn ranchers have a big fight on their hands. They struggle to save one of Arizona's last great wild landscapes not just for themselves, but also for those of us in the cities who yearn for such country, and who find comfort knowing that in southeastern Arizona, there is a place called the Malpai Borderlands. AH